Welcome to the best public space in Seattle

LAWRENCE W. CHEE, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

By LAWRENCE W. CHEEK, P-I ARCHITECTURE COLUMNIST

Updated 10:00 pm, Wednesday, January 17, 2007

The Western Avenue Pavilion, the top entrance to the Olympic Sculpture Park, serves as a lookout aerie, reception room and refuge from the rain, and yet it is architecturally a delight in itself.
Photo: Paul Joseph Brown/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Rain, snow, fog, wind, cold, heat, bugs and seagull mementos notwithstanding, a sculpture park is the best setting that our civilization has yet created for art. The constantly changing environment interacts with the sculptures, making each visit a fresh experience, and people engage the art with less inhibition than in the formal confines of a museum.

And if it's an urban park, so much the better -- at its best, it can be a gloriously rewarding intersection of art, architecture, urbanity and nature. Which is exactly what's happening at the Olympic Sculpture Park. Radically transforming a polluted, disheveled and disconnected site, New York architects Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi have created the best public space in Seattle.

The outrageous difficulties of the 9-acre site -- a 40-foot slope plus a four-lane road and train track punching through it -- actually attracted these architects. They lunged for the job, which they won in competition six years ago. Its issues meshed perfectly into their unusual mission as a firm, which is to create synergies of art, architecture and urban textures.

"It was an opportunity to create a sculpture park that unfurls itself as a part of the city," Manfredi says.

You can enter the park from the top or bottom, starting either from the waterfront walkway or the Western Avenue Pavilion, and the sensory experience will be substantially different each way. It seems more dramatic from the top down, so let's unfurl ourselves into it that way.

The pavilion serves as a lookout aerie, reception room and refuge from the rain, but it has enough architectural delight that it's suddenly one of downtown's top attractions. From its second-story landing, the "Z" pattern of the park circulation below is implied in the pavilion's interior design -- a hint, soon to be confirmed, that a geometric theme is going to be meticulously developed in the park. For the east windows, Weiss/Manfredi commissioned glass with imprinted 1-inch-wide vertical mirrored strips. Views in and out are splintered with reflections, as if to remind that our understanding of what we see is filtered by who we are.

Outside the pavilion, the Z-shaped main drag, 2,200 feet long, directs visitors through miniature meadows, valleys, lawns, forest groves and, finally, to the Elliott Bay shoreline. It may not be apparent until summer, but the middle leg of the Z lines up with Mount Rainier -- so swear the architects, anyway. Smaller paths meander off the Z into small spaces shielded from the city noise and visual commotion. The mix of expansive and intimate spaces is one of the basic principles that makes an urban park work, but it almost has been abandoned in contemporary park design amid concerns about crime and security.

Along the path, views of the sculptures duck and collide with backdrops of Belltown's expensive but dreary condo towers, trucks and trains rumbling underneath the park, and the uncorrupted scenery of mountains and Puget Sound. The park becomes the mediator among all these, and it's clearly saying that art is the product of civilization's chaos, not something pure and set apart from it.

Retaining walls, a geological necessity on such a steeply plunging site, have been designed as if they were sculptures themselves. They're wedge-shaped concrete panels, canted at 12 to 15 degrees so they don't create boxy corridors, and laid in overlaps like fish scales so they can shift with seismic movement rather than cracking.

The architects play intriguing games with perspective here -- sighting down a row of the panels, you're never sure whether they're marching into the ground and tilting into increasing angles, or if it's just a trick of distance. Ambiguity is one of the qualities that lifts working architecture onto the plane of art, and it has been served up in a wonderfully graceful and non-threatening manner here.

By the time you hit the waterfront, you may realize how the geometry has been woven into an integrating theme. The panels, the shapes of the groves and meadows, and the Vivarium, a greenhouse displaying a 60-foot hemlock nurse log in a rain-forest environment, are all compositions of wedge and triangle. From this vantage, the pavilion also shows its best face, a sleek fugue of glass and concrete shards slashing and jabbing at each other. This geometric theme is critical; it's the force that binds the odd-shaped, splintered parcels of land and different landscape packages together.

It may not quite be enough. If there's one failure here, it's that the park may be a potpourri of too many ideas that don't totally blend into coherence, like a bouillabaisse with a mint sprig and a leftover lamb chop tossed in for the hell of it.

The Vivarium is billed as art, but it would make better sense as an educational exhibit in an arboretum or science museum. The aspen grove is supposed to "define the park's transition from city to shore," in the official explanation, but the entire park is about that transition. The quaking aspens seem like herbal ornamentation -- pretty but irrelevant.

But these kvetches are minor, and they barely dilute this park's sudden enrichment of Seattle's urbanity, more far-reaching than anything else built here in the past half-century. It's more provocative than the Space Needle, more complex than any city park, more public than the Central Library, and more interactive than the Seattle Art Museum.

It's more ambitious than all these other landmarks because it grasps at a truly great and audacious idea: It acknowledges that urban life is inherently messy and chaotic, but by drawing nature and art into it, the mess becomes profoundly rewarding.

This park is more than a place to plant big sculptures. It is an affirmation of civilization.